Soft-Story Retrofit in Los Angeles: Which Program Covers Your Address

A soft story is a ground floor with so little solid wall that it cannot hold the building above it sideways. The usual cause is parking: a row of garage openings or a tuck-under carport where a wall would otherwise be. The Department of Building and Safety describes these buildings in terms of what they did rather than how they are built, which is that in past earthquakes multi-story buildings with weak or open front wall lines performed poorly and collapsed.

None of that is a judgement about a particular building. Two buildings on one block with the same shape can be built differently inside, which is why every city that runs one of these programs requires a licensed civil or structural engineer to look before anything is decided.

Ordinance 183893 and Ordinance 184081 reach a building that meets three tests at once, and the Department of Building and Safety states them in this order: two or more stories of wood frame construction; built under building code standards enacted before January 1, 1978; and ground floor parking or other similar open floor space.

The program does not apply to residential buildings with three or fewer units. So a duplex or a triplex with carports underneath is outside this program whatever it looks like.

The program is further along than most people assume. As of February 1, 2024, 9,377 of the 12,347 buildings had obtained a certificate of compliance and 2,970 had not, which is 24% of the inventory past the seven-year date. That is the newest report the department publishes.

One thing the scope does not include, and it is a common misreading: rent stabilization. The Housing Department describes the ordinance in terms of rent-stabilized buildings on the page about recovering the cost, which is true of the cost recovery. The department that administers the ordinance has a wave of orders for condominiums and commercial buildings.

There is no citywide soft-story deadline, and that is the single most misreported thing about this program. The clock starts on the day an owner received their own Order to Comply, and the orders went out in seven waves over eighteen months.

Which wave a building was in depended on its size, so two buildings on the same street can be eighteen months apart. The table below is when each wave started going out, which is not the same as the day any one owner was served.

The priority order was by size, biggest first, on the reasoning that the buildings with the most people in them should be strengthened soonest. Condominiums and commercial buildings came last.

Somebody standing in front of a 1960s concrete apartment block searching for "soft story" is reading about the wrong program. The City of Los Angeles runs a second mandatory retrofit program for non-ductile concrete buildings, and almost nothing about it is the same.

It reaches concrete buildings with a roof or a floor supported by a concrete wall or a concrete column. The cutoff is a plan check date rather than a build date: submitted for plan check before January 13, 1977.

Any concrete building within the ordinance built under a new-building permit application submitted before January 13, 1977 is subject to the ordinance whether LADBS has identified it or not.

LADBS is still identifying the buildings, so there is no list to check. Its own page points an owner at the Permit and Inspection Report, which is the permit history for one property.

Two things reach a tenant, and both are the City of Los Angeles's own rules rather than California's. The first is money. The City Council limited what a landlord may pass on, and the limit is $38 per month a month for up to 120 months.

The second is the work itself, and the protection has a name. A Tenant Habitability Plan is a document the owner prepares with LAHD's own Tenant Habitability Program staff. It sets out the work and the methods the owner, the contractor and the workers will use to reduce the impact on tenants and their belongings while it goes on. It is required on a building subject to the Rent Stabilization Ordinance where the work exposes the building frame, which seismic retrofitting does. LADBS requires the plan to be filed after the permits are pulled, and LAHD will not process a cost-recovery application without one.

The plan has to name the mitigation measures, and LAHD says they may include work procedures that let a tenant stay on site, temporary relocation, or both. The standard it has to meet is specific: A tenant may not be required to occupy an untenantable dwelling, as California Civil Code section 1941.1 defines one, outside the hours of 8am to 5pm Monday to Friday, and may not be exposed at any time to toxic or hazardous materials including lead-based paint and asbestos.

How much notice a tenant gets, and what a tenant relocated for the work is owed, are not on the pages this was read off. They are in the ordinance, and nothing here guesses at either. The unit that handles seismic work is on (213) 252-1464.

The City of Los Angeles does not publish its soft-story inventory as something an address can be checked against. There is no map and no downloadable list.

The inventory comes from the LADBS Custodian of Records. That office answers public records requests, and its own page says anyone can make one and that records are open for inspection during regular office hours. It publishes no online form, so a request is a telephone call or an email.

One thing to know before you click: the soft-story page carries a link labeled "Verify if My Building Applied". The soft-story page carries a link labeled "Verify if My Building Applied". It opens a bar chart of program totals citywide and by council district as of February 1, 2024. It verifies no building and names no address.

For one building rather than the whole list, the owner is the fastest route, because every identified building was served an order. In the City of Los Angeles the clock runs from the day the owner received the order: 2 years to submit proof of a previous retrofit or plans to retrofit or demolish, 3.5 years to pull the permit, and 7 years to finish the work.

The City of Long Beach wrote the useful version of that about its own map: "A SWOF condition in a building exists whether the building is identified on a list or not." A building absent from a list was not cleared by anybody. It was not looked at.

Not finding a building here does not mean it is safe or exempt. This check names the program that applies to an address. It does not read any city's inventory, and no answer on it is a statement about a building.

This page holds a program for 9 of the 88 cities in Los Angeles County: 8 with a mandatory ordinance, plus Long Beach, which surveyed its buildings and requires nothing. 4 of the 9 publish the affected properties, which is the part the largest city does not.

Which of them covers an address is decided by the city line. A mailing address that says Los Angeles is not the same thing as being in the City of Los Angeles. Some addresses that take LA mail are unincorporated county land, and much of the San Fernando Valley is inside the city under postal names of its own: Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Encino, Canoga Park, Reseda, Northridge, Sylmar and Woodland Hills are all City of Los Angeles addresses.

This page holds a program for nine of the 88 cities in Los Angeles County. A city that is not among them may still have one: the eight mandatory ordinances here were found by opening each city's own site, and several cities' sites cannot be read from where this page is built. So an answer that names no program means this page does not hold one, never that the city has none.

Long Beach is the case worth reading even if you do not live there. It surveyed its buildings, notified every owner twice, published a searchable map and required nothing: its own FAQ says the program is voluntary and that there are no immediate consequences for an owner who does not strengthen a building. Whether Los Angeles County requires soft-story retrofits on the land it governs directly is not established on this page. Every Los Angeles County web host, including Public Works and the county code, refuses the connection from where this page is built, so no County page was read.

The grant everybody has heard of is the wrong one. An Earthquake Brace + Bolt retrofit is only done on wood-framed, pre-1980 homes with a raised foundation. The work it pays for is bolting a house to its foundation and bracing the short cripple walls above it. A building with ground-floor parking does not have that condition, and the program's own page describes no story or unit limit because the foundation requirement does the work.

There is a right one, run by the same agency. Earthquake Multi-Unit Retrofit strengthens multi-unit residential buildings with a soft, weak or open-front seismic deficiency. It is run by the California Residential Mitigation Program, the same joint powers authority that runs Brace + Bolt.

The retrofit has to be a full ground-floor retrofit under FEMA P-807, IEBC Chapter A4 or ASCE 41. A line-only retrofit does not qualify. Registration windows open and close, so the program's own page is the only place worth reading for whether one is open.

A homeowner with a raised-foundation house is in the right place with Brace + Bolt: Up to $3,000 toward a code-compliant seismic retrofit of a qualifying house. An income-eligible homeowner can apply for a further grant of up to $7,000.